This is from a timelapse taken over 15 hours of a fire ant colony before, during, and after a heavy rain storm. There was about an hour and a half of very heavy rain which collapsed the anthill. When the rain stopped, the ants poured out and spent many hours rebuilding the hill.

I setup my DSLR camera to take pictures with a timelapse trigger just in time before the rain started. I’ve tried this a few times and usually something goes wrong, either the rain doesn’t come or it rains but the ants don’t do anything afterward. This time it worked out perfectly.

The beginning of the video up until it stops raining is at 420x normal speed then it changes to around 720x normal speed. I included a few real-time clips took while the timelapse camera was running (1:40) so you can see how slow of a process it actually is for the ants.